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And still, there is so much time to practice loving, which is the paradox, isn’t it? We must do what we are here to do–to step into and join the work calling our names without fear, knowing that our work is meaningful and valuable and that our work is not the material with which we craft our identity. That we don’t need to hurry up and save the world–that the world every day is being saved, already, and we are invited to participate in the work.
And more often than not, these transfiguration moments are transformation moments, because that’s, miraculously, how God works. That the death and the life are all tied up together, that they’re both inherently pieces of the other. That in order to fall in love, some parts of you have to die. Or when you face the results of some unfortunate thing you might have done, God forms you into a person that looks a little bit more like Jesus, which is life.
All this time, my body was moving towards answers even when I didn’t have the words. As I drove out of Pittsburgh for the last time, I realized this move felt big because it embodied the answers to the questions about what I believed to be important. The direction I turned at this fork in the road would determine both who I was and what I was trying to be in the world. This surety in my choice to come home that stunned me, this choice to listen (for once) to that holy tugging in my gut asking me to embrace my life. Not my friends’ lives, not lives of people I envy, not a noisy or particularly instagrammable, objectively impressive life, but the one that was unfolding in front of me. The life I was living. The life I am living. It was as if, all of a sudden, I understood that Mary Oliver line I began this post with: “the past is the past and the present is what your life is.” And above the cacophony of my own questions, Mary’s question to me cut through like a descant:
“will you live your life?”
on remembering death, sitting in the questions, forming constellations, and the mystery of hope
a photo-music-poem collaboration with Gaute Lorentsen and Enoch Leung, inspired by the images of the Nordic landscape, the concept of naming a place as your home and the bold risk it is to claim a piece of earth as one’s own
a New Year reflection: on a year of writing haikus and walking into the next one, full of unknown and adventure and learning to be brave. Full of un-expectation. And maybe full of dragons, too.
an essay on tired fists and open hands, bitter winters and blistering heat, an overflowing fountain and a deep well
on the thick, angry sadness in the air and in our bodies, our deep longing for renewal, the questions that feel too honest to ask, an invitation to step into our own story, and the spiritual practice of lament
an essay about the the growth that begins in the darkness of the soil, a poet, sycamore fig trees, and working through the fear of falling behind in your own story
The sun was setting as I waited in my car in the parking lot of my friend’s apartment complex, jotting down some ideas for a poem in my journal. I looked up as two boys, probably about ten years old, came racing down to the dumpsters, laughing, hauling their massive bags of trash above their heads and hurling them into
I write to you today on this very second day of February, cocooned under my pink blanket- a favorite hiding place- and sitting on the floor against my childhood bed, watching the branches of my tree outside the window, with it’s baby blossoms, sway back and forth in the wind of what seems like the precursor to the
Am I willing to adventure into the making, even if I might slip? Am I willing to make a mess? Am I willing to scratch out an idea when I’d rather be asleep? Am I willing to wake up and watch the snowfall instead of sleeping through it? Am I willing to say the brave thing that would be easier left unsaid, and remain accountable to it? Am I willing to take up space for the view? Am I willing to try to do the thing that scares me? And to commit, for the rest of my life, to the telling about it?